Administration Urged to Renew China Defense Ties : Diplomacy: U.S. needs military contacts to keep abreast of Beijing’s arms sales, buildups, officials say.

In an effort with important consequences for future military developments in Asia, an array of congressional and military leaders and scholars are urging the Clinton Administration to resume the long-frozen defense ties between the United States and China.

A surprising number of American officials and organizations contend that the Administration should lift the ban on high-level military exchanges between the United States and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

The once-extensive U.S.-Chinese military links--justified during the Cold War years by the two nations’ common interest in fending off a Soviet military threat--were abruptly dissolved in 1989 after the Chinese army’s violent suppression of the Tian An Men Square pro-democracy demonstrations.

Now, proponents of resuming ties argue that new factors, including China’s sales of dangerous weapons around the world and its recent defense buildup, provide a different rationale for U.S. contacts with Chinese military leaders.

The Pentagon signaled its own eagerness for a renewal of links last fall when two members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. David Jeremiah and Air Force Gen. Merrill A. McPeak, showed up in uniform for a reception at the Chinese Embassy in Washington.

And some liberal Democrats in Congress, too, are arguing that, for different reasons than in the past, it is important to begin talking with China’s military leaders again.

“They didn’t all carry out the orders at Tian An Men,” Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), a leading member of the House Armed Services Committee, said of the top leaders of the PLA.

Ending the ban on military contacts, Schroeder said, “is not for their good, it’s for our good, if we can be blunt about it. . . . We’ve had a terrific problem with (China) selling weapons to countries we don’t like, like Iraq. We’d like to know what their intentions are, which way their guns are pointed, whether they have their own agenda. These are things we don’t pick up through satellites.”

Many American specialists on China note that military leaders will play an important, perhaps decisive role in any power struggle in Beijing after the death of China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping.

“The key to China’s political future will continue to rest in large part with the PLA,” concluded Michael D. Swaine in a recent RAND Corp. study, “The Military and Political Succession in China.”

Lifting the ban on military ties would take on additional symbolic importance, beyond defense: It would remove one of the last remaining sanctions imposed on China after the 1989 Beijing massacre.

The George Bush Administration gradually removed or eased many of the other sanctions, such as the prohibition against high-level official contacts with Beijing and the U.S. opposition to World Bank lending for China. The last Tian An Men sanctions in effect are the bans on military ties and arms sales.

Resuming military exchanges between the Pentagon and the PLA might also conceivably open the door for an eventual resumption of U.S. arms sales or the transfer of military technology to China. But most experts believe that in the current climate of mutual suspicion, any arms relationship would be, at best, limited.

So far, the Clinton Administration has suggested it may take a relatively hard line against any substantial easing of U.S.-China relations, unless China shows a greater willingness to address human rights violations. And human rights groups say they, too, remain opposed to a resumption of military ties with Beijing, although they suggest they might be willing in some circumstances to go along with the idea.

“We would not be in favor of resuming military exchanges, unless it were part of a package of carrots and sticks, with the Chinese making a major concession in return,” said Mike Jendrzejczyk, Washington director of Asia Watch, a human rights group.

In the decade before the Tian An Men upheavals, U.S. and Chinese military officials cooperated in a wide range of endeavors.

They helped to provide arms to resistance movements in Afghanistan and Cambodia. Beginning in the mid-1980s, the United States sold some military equipment and technology to China.

And top leaders of the two defense establishments, including defense secretaries and senior uniformed leaders, carried out regular, high-profile exchanges with one another. When Gen. John W. Vessey, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, first met with China’s top army commander in 1985, he spoke of the importance of “soldier-to-soldier” conversations.

“The meetings were very warm, because we had a common enemy (the Soviet Union),” says Lawrence J. Korb, who visited China as a defense official of the Ronald Reagan Administration and is now at the Brookings Institution.

Still, participants now acknowledge that beneath the outward displays of friendliness, there remained considerable mistrust, a legacy of the era when American and Chinese Communist forces fought one another on the battlefield during the Korean War.

When then-Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger visited China, a member of his entourage recalls, the CIA gave U.S. officials special masks that enabled them to converse with one another inside Chinese guest houses without having their conversations monitored by Chinese intelligence.

When one Chinese military leader toured the United States, American officials took note, apparently for intelligence purposes, of the fact that his hotel bill showed the old soldier had a penchant for watching X-rated movies.

After Deng and President Yang Shangkun, themselves both military leaders, ordered Chinese troops into Beijing to put down pro-democracy demonstrations centered on Tian An Men Square, there were reports that some PLA officers objected and were at odds with one another. But in the end, China’s military leadership united and carried out the crackdown.

On June 5, 1989, while tanks were rumbling through Beijing and army units were still firing on civilian protesters, President Bush broke off the U.S. military relationship with China.

It has never been restored. The United States stopped its sales of military equipment to the PLA, and China canceled a huge contract that it had signed for advanced U.S. electronics technology to upgrade its jet fighters. At the working level, U.S. military officers once welcomed into the homes of Chinese officers found themselves out in the cold.

Some American defense officials and scholars maintain that the current policy is counterproductive.

“The suspension of high-level military contacts is hurting us in the long run,” says Paul Godwin, a China scholar at the National Defense University. “If we want to talk to the Chinese about problems of non-proliferation, we’ve got to talk to the military.”

Michel Oksenberg, president of the East-West Center in Honolulu, argues that the United States is depriving itself of a chance to learn why China has been buying new arms, why it carried out a huge nuclear test last year and why it has made territorial claims in ways that disturb Southeast Asian countries.

“The Chinese perception of threats directed against it is not something that I think we in the United States understand,” he said. “We don’t have a sense of what is the Chinese projection of their force posture three to five years hence.”

Over the past year, American officials have made some tentative steps toward renewing the ties. A delegation from the National Defense University visited Beijing last May, and a phalanx of Pentagon officials went in uniform to a National Day celebration of the Chinese Embassy in Washington last October.

A Pentagon spokesman said the attendance of two members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at this function “was not a violation of our existing sanctions” against military tieswith China, because the sanctions apply only to high-level visits from one country to another.

Last December, outgoing Bush Administration officials also cleared the way for the release of military equipment that China had bought before the Tian An Men upheavals. The goods had been sitting in warehouses in this country for three years.

Over the past year, the PLA leaders, seeking to modernize China’s military, have turned their attention from the United States to Russia, buying huge amounts of equipment from former Soviet factories. Some American scholars suggest they would not rule out renewing U.S. arms sales to China.

“You can cross that bridge when you have to,” said Dr. Alfred D. Wilhelm Jr., vice president of the Atlantic Council and a former U.S. military attache in Beijing. “I would think arms sales would be one of the last areas you’d get into, although the Chinese would want that to be among the first.”

Others say the Pentagon’s suspicions about China’s military ambitions make this idea unlikely.

“There’s an element within the Department of Defense that says, ‘We want to restore military ties (with China) for the cause of non-proliferation, but we’ve got to watch these guys, ‘ “ Godwin said.